350
IRIS MURDOCH
is
important or fundamental; and it can well be that arguments of
this type in morals and politics have discouraged some kinds of free
inquiry and of philosophical inventiveness. However, as Mr. Gell–
ner himself points out, philosophers are already becoming critical
of this line of thought; and recent work in ethics (Stuart Hamp–
shire's "Thought and Action," for instance) is markedly less
"naturalistic." So that even here I think that Mr. Gellner is con–
struing a temporary phase as a fundamental position.
If
we turn to other regions of philosophy Mr. Gellner's view
is still less convincing. Mr. Gellner states that Linguistic Philosophy
has not solved any major philosophical problem. It is a little early
to say this. The extremely difficult work of Wittgenstein, so far
from providing a facile technique, has not yet been properly studied
and assimilated, and it will be some time before it becomes clear
exactly what sort of philosophy is to emerge from this disturbed
time. However, Linguistic Philosophy has, even by now, it seems to
me, enormously clarified the issues in many fields of logic and of
epistemology, where it
has
advanced, and
has
solved problems, al–
though these fields remain places of hot dispute.
Moreover it is not the case here that Linguistic Philosophy is
the simple-minded naturalism uncritically accepting ordinary
language, which Mr. Gellner pictures. It is an extremely Kantian
philosophy. It searches in language for structures of thought about
which philosophical problems congregate. How permanent and
how fundamental these structures are is something which Linguistic
Philosophy also investigates; nor does it, in doing so, always avoid
making
general
critical judgments on concepts currently in use.
Such general judgments, often of a highly polemical kind, have
been made, for instance, in ethics, in relation to the content of
theological discourse, and in the theory of mind. What after all
is Professor Ryle's "Concept of Mind" but a critical survey of
mistakes
concerning the mind which are embedded in the structure
of language? Whether or not one agrees with these general judg–
ments, there is little substance in Mr. Gellner's view that Linguistic
Philosophy "teaches" that everything is as it seems.
What, after all, is Mr. Gellner's own game? In a passage in
which he seems disposed to defend Russell's Theory of Descrip–
tions he speaks of Russellian empiricism as "legitimate" and "un-
